The Life of Francis Marion

By W. Gilmore Simms

Author of "Yemassee", "History of South Carolina", etc.

Contents

Contents.

Note.

In preparing this biography, the following works have been consulted:

Preface.

The facts, in the life of Francis Marion, are far less generally extended in our country than his fame. The present is an attempt to supply this deficiency, and to justify, by the array of authentic particulars, the high position which has been assigned him among the master-workers in our revolutionary history. The task has been a difficult, but I trust not entirely an unsuccessful one. Our southern chronicles are meagre and unsatisfactory. South Carolina was too long in the occupation of the British—too long subject to the ravages of civil and foreign war, to have preserved many of those minor records which concern only the renown of individuals, and are unnecessary to the comprehension of great events; and the vague tributes of unquestioning tradition are not adequate authorities for the biographer, whose laws are perhaps even more strict than those which govern the historian. Numerous volumes, some private manuscripts, and much unpublished correspondence, to which reference has been more particularly made in the appendix, have been consulted in the preparation of this narrative. The various histories of Carolina and Georgia have also been made use of. Minor facts have been gathered from the lips of living witnesses. Of the two works devoted especially to our subject, that by the Rev. Mr. Weems is most generally known—a delightful book for the young. The author seems not to have contemplated any less credulous readers, and its general character is such as naturally to inspire us with frequent doubts of its statements. Mr. Weems had rather loose notions of the privileges of the biographer; though, in reality, he has transgressed much less in his Life of Marion than is generally supposed. But the untamed, and sometimes extravagant exuberance of his style might well subject his narrative to suspicion. Of the "Sketch" by the Hon. Judge James, we are more secure, though, as a literary performance, it is quite as devoid of merit as pretension. Besides, the narrative is not thorough. It dwells somewhat too minutely upon one class of facts, to the neglect or the exclusion of others. I have made both of these works tributary to my own whenever this was possible.

Woodland, S.C., May 25, 1844.

THE LIFE OF FRANCIS MARION

Chapter 1.

The name of FRANCIS MARION is identified, in the history of South Carolina, his parent state, with all that is pleasing and exciting in romance. He is, par excellence, the famous partisan of that region. While Sumter stands conspicuous for bold daring, fearless intrepidity and always resolute behavior; while Lee takes eminent rank as a gallant Captain of Cavalry, the eye and the wing of the southern liberating army under Greene; Marion is proverbially the great master of strategy—the wily fox of the swamps—never to be caught, never to be followed,—yet always at hand, with unconjectured promptness, at the moment when he is least feared and is least to be expected. His pre-eminence in this peculiar and most difficult of all kinds of warfare, is not to be disputed. In his native region he has no competitor, and it is scarcely possible to compute the vast influence which he possessed and exercised over the minds and feelings of the people of Carolina, simply through his own resources, at a period most adverse to their fortunes, and when the cause of their liberties, everywhere endangered, was almost everywhere considered hopeless. His name was the great rallying cry of the yeoman in battle—the word that promised hope—that cheered the desponding patriot—that startled, and made to pause in his career of recklessness and blood, the cruel and sanguinary tory. Unprovided with the means of warfare, no less than of comfort—wanting equally in food and weapons—we find him supplying the one deficiency with a cheerful courage that never failed; the other with the resources of a genius that seemed to wish for nothing from without. With a force constantly fluctuating and feeble in consequence of the most ordinary necessities—half naked men, feeding upon unsalted pottage,—forced to fight the enemy by day, and look after their little families, concealed in swamp or thicket, by night—he still contrived,—one knows not well how,—to keep alive and bright the sacred fire of his country's liberties, at moments when they seemed to have no other champion. In this toil and watch, taken cheerfully and with spirits that never appeared to lose their tone and elasticity, tradition ascribes to him a series of achievements, which, if they were small in comparison with the great performances of European war, were scarcely less important; and which, if they sometimes transcend belief, must yet always delight the imagination. His adventures have given a rich coloring to fable, and have stimulated its performances. The language of song and story has been employed to do them honor, and our children are taught, in lessons that they love, to lisp the deeds and the patriotism of his band. "Marion"—"Marion's Brigade" and "Marion's men", have passed into household words, which the young utter with an enthusiasm much more confiding than that which they yield to the wondrous performances of Greece and Ilium. They recall, when spoken, a long and delightful series of brilliant exploits, wild adventures, by day and night, in swamp and thicket, sudden and strange manoeuvres, and a generous, unwavering ardor, that never found any peril too hazardous, or any suffering too unendurable. The theme, thus invested, seems to have escaped the ordinary bounds of history. It is no longer within the province of the historian. It has passed into the hands of the poet, and seems to scorn the appeal to authentic chronicles. When we look for the record we find but little authority for a faith so confiding, and seemingly so exaggerated. The story of the Revolution in the southern colonies has been badly kept. Documentary proofs are few, bald and uninteresting. A simple paragraph in the newspapers,—those newspapers issued not unfrequently in cities where the enemy had power, and in the control of Editors, unlike the present, who were seldom able to expatiate upon the achievement which they recorded;—or the brief dispatches of the Captain himself, whose modesty would naturally recoil from stating more than the simple result of his performances;—these are usually the sum total of our authorities. The country, sparsely settled, and frequently overrun by the barbarous enemy, was incapable of that patient industry and persevering care, which could chronicle the passing event, give place and date to the brilliant sortie, the gallant struggle, the individual deed of audacity, which, by a stroke, and at a moment, secures an undying remembrance in the bosoms of a people. The fame of Marion rests very much upon tradition. There is little in the books to justify the strong and exciting relish with which the name is spoken and remembered throughout the country. He was not a bloody warrior. His battle fields were never sanguinary. His ardor was never of a kind to make him imprudent. He was not distinguished for great strength of arm, or great skill in his weapon. We have no proofs that he was ever engaged in single combat: yet the concurrent testimony of all who have written, declare, in general terms, his great services: and the very exaggeration of the popular estimate is a partial proof of the renown for which it speaks. In this respect, his reputation is like that of all other heroes of romantic history. It is a people's history, written in their hearts, rather than in their books; which their books could not write—which would lose all its golden glow, if subjected to the cold details of the phlegmatic chronicles. The tradition, however swelling, still testifies to that large merit which must have been its basis, by reason of which the name of the hero was selected from all others for such peculiar honors; and though these exaggerations suggest a thousand difficulties in the way of sober history, they yet serve to increase the desire, as well as the necessity, for some such performance.

The family of Marion came from France. They emigrated to South Carolina somewhere about the year 1685, within twenty years after the first British settlement of the province. They belonged, in the parent country, to that sect of religious dissenters which bore the name of Huguenots; and were among those who fled from the cruel persecutions which, in the beginning of the reign of Louis XIV., followed close upon the re-admission of the Jesuits into France. The edict of Nantz, which had been issued under the auspices of Henri IV., and by which the Huguenots had been guaranteed, with some slight qualifications, the securities of the citizen, almost in the same degree with the Catholic inhabitants, had, under the weak and tyrannous sway of the former monarch, proved totally inadequate to their protection. Long before its formal revocation, the unmeasured and inhuman persecutions to which they were subjected, drove thousands of them into voluntary banishment. The subsequent decree of Louis, by which even the nominal securities of the Huguenots were withdrawn, increased the number of the exiles, and completed the sentence of separation from all those ties which bind the son to the soil. The neighboring Protestant countries received the fugitives, the number and condition of whom may be estimated by the simple fact, not commonly known, that England alone possessed "eleven regiments composed entirely of these unhappy refugees, besides others enrolled among the troops of the line. There were in London twenty French churches supported by Government; about three thousand refugees were maintained by public subscription; many received grants from the crown; and a great number lived by their own industry.* Some of the nobility were naturalized and obtained high rank; among others, Ruvigny, son of the Marquis, was made Earl of Galway, and Schomberg received the dignity of Duke."**

America, the new world, was naturally a land of refuge, and soon received her share of these unhappy fugitives. The transition was easy from England to her colonies. Every facility was afforded them for transportation, and the wise policy which encouraged their settlement in the new countries was amply rewarded by the results. Altogether, the Huguenots were a much better sort of people than those who usually constituted the mass of European emigrants. The very desperation of their circumstances was a proof of their virtues. They were a people of principle, for they had suffered everything for conscience sake. They were a people of pure habits, for it was because of their religion that they suffered banishment. In little patriarchal groups of sixty, seventy, or eighty families, they made their way to different parts of America; and with the conscious poverty of their own members, were generally received with open arms by those whom they found in possession of the soil. The English, as they beheld the dependent and destitute condition of the fugitives, forgot, for a season, their usual national animosities; and assigning ample tracts of land for their occupation, beheld them, without displeasure, settling down in exclusive colonies, in which they sought to maintain, as far as possible, the pious habits and customs of the mother country. One of these communities, comprising from seventy to eighty families, found their way to the banks of the Santee in South Carolina.* From this point they gradually spread themselves out so as to embrace, in partial settlements, the spacious tract of country stretching to the Winyah, on the one hand, and the sources of Cooper River on the other; extending upward into the interior, following the course of the Santee nearly to the point where it loses its identity in receiving the descending streams of the Wateree and Congaree. These settlers were generally poor. They had been despoiled of all their goods by the persecutions which had driven them into exile. This, indeed, had been one of the favorite modes by which this result had been effected. Doubtless, also, it had been, among the subordinates of the crown, one of the chief motives of the persecution. It was a frequent promise of his Jesuit advisers, to the vain and bigoted Louis, that the heretics should be brought into the fold of the Church without a drop of bloodshed; and, until the formal revocation of the edict of Nantz, by which the Huguenots were put without the pale and protection of the laws, spoliation was one of the means, with others, by which to avoid this necessity. These alternatives, however, were of a kind not greatly to lessen the cruelties of the persecutor or the sufferings of the victim. It does not fall within our province to detail them. It is enough that one of the first and most obvious measures by which to keep their promise to the king, was to dispossess the proscribed subjects of their worldly goods and chattels. By this measure a two-fold object was secured. While the heretic was made to suffer, the faithful were sure of their reward. It was a principle faithfully kept in view; and the refugees brought with them into exile, little beyond the liberties and the virtues for which they had endured so much. But these were possessions, as their subsequent history has shown, beyond all price.

Our humble community along the Santee had suffered the worst privations of their times and people. But, beyond the necessity of hard labor, they had little to deplore, at the outset, in their new condition. They had been schooled sufficiently by misfortune to have acquired humility. They observed, accordingly, in their new relations, a policy equally prudent and sagacious. More flexible in their habits than the English, they conciliated the latter by deference; and, soothing the unruly passions of the Indians—the Santee and Sewee tribes, who were still in considerable numbers in their immediate neighborhood—they won them to alliance by kindness and forbearance. From the latter, indeed, they learned their best lessons for the cultivation of the soil. That, upon which they found themselves, lay in the unbroken forest. The high lands which they first undertook to clear, as less stubborn, were most sterile; and, by a very natural mistake, our Frenchmen adopted the modes and objects of European culture; the grains, the fruits and the vegetables, as well as the implements, to which they had been accustomed. The Indians came to their succor, taught them the cultivation of maize, and assisted them in the preparation of their lands; in return for lessons thought equally valuable by the savages, to whom they taught, along with gentler habits and morals, a better taste for music and the dance! To subdue the forest, of itself, to European hands, implied labors not unlike those of Hercules. But the refugees, though a gentle race, were men of soul and strength, capable of great sacrifices, and protracted self-denial. Accommodating themselves with a patient courage to the necessities before them, they cheerfully undertook and accomplished their tasks. We have more than one lively picture among the early chroniclers of the distress and hardship which they were compelled to encounter at the first. But, in this particular, there was nothing peculiar in their situation. It differed in no respect from that which fell to the lot of all the early colonists in America. The toil of felling trees, over whose heavy boughs and knotty arms the winters of centuries had passed; the constant danger from noxious reptiles and beasts of prey, which, coiled in the bush or crouching in the brake, lurked day and night, in waiting for the incautious victim; and, most insidious and fatal enemy of all, the malaria of the swamp, of the rank and affluent soil, for the first time laid open to the sun; these are all only the ordinary evils which encountered in America, at the very threshold, the advances of European civilisation. That the Huguenots should meet these toils and dangers with the sinews and the hearts of men, was to be expected from their past experience and history. They had endured too many and too superior evils in the old world, to be discouraged by, or to shrink from, any of those which hung upon their progress in the new. Like the hardy Briton, whom, under the circumstances, we may readily suppose them to have emulated, they addressed themselves, with little murmuring, to the tasks before them. We have, at the hands of one of their number,—a lady born and raised in affluence at home,—a lively and touching picture of the sufferings and duties, which, in Carolina, at that period, neither sex nor age was permitted to escape. "After our arrival," she writes, "we suffered every kind of evil. In about eighteen months our elder brother, unaccustomed to the hard labor we were obliged to undergo, died of a fever. Since leaving France, we had experienced every kind of affliction, disease, pestilence, famine, poverty and hard labor! I have been for six months together without tasting bread, working the ground like a slave; and I have even passed three or four years without always having it when I wanted it. I should never have done were I to attempt to detail to you all our adventures."*